Piggybacking on the Chatter

In the constantly evolving world of consumer-generated media, online communities and other public blog forums have recently felt the high-dollar world of corporate advertising slowly encroaching upon the terrain formerly reserved for bloggers. While advertisers are reluctant to directly interfere with consumer-generated content for fear of a massive backlash, advertisers have been successful at interweaving advertising messages throughout the domain of consumer-generated media.

Enter the new term coined in an article by ClickZ: "Chatterbacking."

Web-savvy marketers have been utilizing persuasive techniques to entice bloggers to write about their products or services for several years now. Until now, it was commonly assumed that the field of public blogging would remain unadulterated by the inclusion of paid advertising on their web sites. With the advent of Chatterbacking, advertisers are no longer intimidated by consumer-generated content and have instead embraced this field in order to capitalize on its innate ability to be more credible and exciting than traditional paid electronic advertising.

Chatterbacking goes further than merely influencing consumer opinions. Chatterbacking is becoming a science, with marketers scrambling to determine how best to couple paid media with complimentary consumer-generated content. Fox Interactive Media, parent of the social community MySpace, has recently signed a $900 million deal with Google, making Google the supplier of search results and paid listings for the MySpace web site.

With Chatterbacking an essential element in the marketer's toolbox, it will be left to the bloggers to decide just how much and how long they are going to allow companies to profit from their content. Marketers must be able to create a synergistic relationship that will benefit both the consumer-generated community and the advertiser without unraveling the fabric of independence that holds consumer communities and blog sites together.

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